


Home Pulls You Back

by RoryKurago



Category: The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Series
Genre: 1920s, Bisexual Character, Egypt, Gen, Oneshot, Pre-Canon, Swearing, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 02:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21659830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: Rick has to cross an ocean (twice), fight several wars, and commit himself to the desert to find home. Evie has to wade through all of England's conservative condescension.But against the grain or not, home always pulls you back.
Kudos: 10
Collections: Rory's 100 Themes Writing Challenge





	1. #21: Door

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't expecting to write for The Mummy, of all things, tonight, but I'm re-watching it so here we are.

Rick joined the French Foreign Legion in 1920, straight off the back of his army discharge. It seemed like an easier decision than going back to bussing tables and hauling produce crates in an American hotel in Tripoli. Or worse: explaining to his academic father why he couldn’t just come back to Michigan, put his head down, and slog through university.

Particularly a man with his… proclivities.

The vacationing couple who had adopted him out of country from Cairo to a quiet country town in the States had really tried to scrub the Africa out of him. His adoptive father even went to the extent of splurging on an an expensive wristwatch to cover the orphanage’s blue tattoo—a pricy gift for an academic and a housewife. An intellectual might debate whether the attempt was to their credit or not. Rick simply acknowledged that it had happened, and that it had been ineffectual. Home always pulled you back.

He’d found his way back to Africa even before the world caught up with him. The war had been, if nothing else, a door to a new version of himself. A version that he liked, and that he couldn’t imagine surviving another Michigan winter of study he didn’t care about in books written by cloistered ball-tuggers who didn’t know jack about shit, to get into a career that made him want to drink anti-freeze.

Soldier Rick knew that life was too damn short to stick a bag over your head and a thumb up your ass. There was adventure to be had. And, he’d found, there were more dark corners in Africa to hide what you didn’t want seen than there were back in the States.

Perhaps in an effort to slake his adventurous tendencies, his parents had indulged him in literature. The luxury of a county library brought Verne, Wells; pulp fiction with a hundred heroes and thousands of lost treasures. Solomon’s diamond mines drilled through his dreams, along with fields of secret poppies, Viking hoards, mythic Greek war spoils, and a solid gold capstone to the Great Pyramids. Chryselephantine statues from a hundred sacked cities marched in lines through his school books.

To their credit, his parents hadn’t made a big deal out of their surrender. They’d only implored that he write. To his credit, he did, when he had paper and time to spare. Atlantic steamers always needed crew, and there was always time to read in his bunk between shifts. Less so in the trenches.

The war chewed him up a little but it spat him out right where he wanted to be: the threshold of the dark continent.

It wasn’t the violence, or the fact that nobody asked too many questions so long as he had a good story (with at least one woman in it). He got real good at putting together a good story. Better at sniffing out adventures to base them on.

It was just that Africa agreed with him. It was the right mix of hot, bold, demanding, lawless, and anonymous. Nobody gave a damn who he was or where he came from, provided he minded his business and told people firmly enough where to shove it when they tried to mind it for him.

That, and he goddamned loved not having a stuffed-up sinus every two damn days.

Big and capable as he was, he’d had enough offers to do security and the like—hotels with Western clientele, mercenary companies, and one particularly memorable incitement from a Benghazi brothel. He’d let the wooing part of that go on for a good while before turning them down.

Ultimately, the Foreign Legion just had the best reputation for not being fucked with—and for going to the most interesting places. Rick had strolled under the garrison lintel without a second thought.

He’d been in a week when he met Benny. Two weeks later, Benny stiffed him for the first time – losing big on a poker night in the garrison town, then telling the game organiser that Rick was good for it, and vanishing.

The two burly men who finally threw Rick out the back door into a slimy alley told him not to come back. He’d figured it was just a matter of having enough money, and didn’t take it personally.

Benny had slithered back as Rick was washing the crusty grime off his face in a horse trough down the street.

Benny apologised profusely. “It’s just… you know,” he’d said with an ingratiating grin, “you have a much stronger jaw than me. I’m delicate man, you know? My strength is in my brain. But you—you’re like one of the old gods. Steel jaw and two big brass balls. You can take a punch so much better than me.”

That whole episode presented itself in hindsight as a big honking gateway crime.

Still, Rick kept the little fucker around, because Benny had a way of turning even the worst shitstorm to his advantage—a plus, if you were standing behind him when it hit the fan. And as many times as he disappeared, he always came back.

Six months on, when the Legion kicked Rick up to Corporal for keeping his head during a particularly ass-puckering encounter with some antsy ex-Arab-irregulars, a good pal asked him:

Was he sorry now that he’d signed up? He could have just stuck to the coast, traded on his looks and war record. Could have spent the rest of his life flirting with tourists and getting all the French pussy he could handle.

Was he sick of the Legion yet?

Rick thought about it. Thought good and hard.

Then he downed his drink and said only half-joking, “Naw, not yet. Best worst decision I ever made.” Then he tipped his chair back, threw his winning cards on the table, and prepared to get punched by the big Arab whose money he’d just taken for the third night running.


	2. #15: Trees

Evie stepped off the river boat at the Cairo docks with two boxes of books she couldn’t bear to leave behind, a valise of clothes, a letter of introduction to the curator of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, and a very sensible hat. Yes, this was exactly where she had dreamed of standing since boarding school—no, since the first time her parents had brought her and Jonathon to a dig during school holidays. Their father had shown them the great holes in the ground and a tray of insignificant-looking pottery shards, then their mother had explained the great and mysterious past tantalisingly suggested by these simple little items – a clay tablet, a lamp, a bronze hair pin. The roots of Egypt went deep, she’d explained.

Their Egyptian grandfather had further whet their appetites with stories of great battles, kings, and demons of the sands.

Jonathon had been more interested in stories of the great funerary hoard buried in the area which their father hoped to find, but Evie was fascinated. How did they live, those long-dead people? What did they see and smell and hear every day? When they looked up at the night sky or the dawning sun, what did they think? Of what did they dream?

She’d imagined all the little offshoots and aspects of life pulling together to create a beautiful whole—an awesome tree, with the Nile watering its roots. She imagined she was a cattle-boy guarding his family’s livelihood, an apprentice scribe learning her letters, a princess smoothing along the governance of an empire. Through the blood of her mother, she _was_ Egypt. She’d never wanted to return to England.

And now she was back. She felt Egypt flowing through her, around her. She felt her spirit put forth flowers. (The objectionable body odour of the men in her vicinity notwithstanding.) It felt wonderful to home. She’d missed it all:

The baking air; the colours of the carpets hanging out this window and flower-boxes out that; the dock workers singing out to each other in a dozen dialects. She had even missed the smells of camel dung and frying oil.

Wet woollen socks, smarting knuckles for poor penmanship, and weak milky tea seemed aeons ago. She had ached to be here through dreary years at boarding school; striven like a madwoman against coursework and condescending professors at Oxford. She had battled Jonathon’s chortles, her Oxford advisor’s raised eyebrows, her English grandparents aghast protestations that she couldn’t move her entire life to ‘ _that ratbitten country’_ …

Yet here she was. Home. At last.

Jonathon was already here, flitting from one den of iniquity to the next (although he used the word ‘dig’). His last fanciful, slapdash ‘research paper’ had generated titters that took months to die down. Evie fiercely defended him, but she was sick to death and back of always being on the defensive. It was time to put herself on the board and revive her parents’ good name with some world-class archaeology. It was her hope that Jonathon might be calmed and brought back to keel with her at least in the same country, but if not… Well, she would simply have to do it singlehandedly, if necessary.

She knew she ought to wait for the boat to finish unloading, but after days shut up on boats full of sleek, judgemental French tourists and carousing Australians, she couldn’t stand another minute shut up inside.

She allowed a sailor to hand her off the ramp with a polite dip of her head, her valise under one arm and pocketbook under the other.

It was early afternoon; a light breeze was blowing down the avenue and rustling the tips of trees planted to shade cafés across the way; elegant couples strolled the waterside and arcades in cool linen suits and lace parasols. Here and there were signs of the war – army belts and boots for sale, shop awnings patched with incongruent canvas, alert men in uniform strolling down the street with rifles over their shoulders. However life generally seemed to have taken the upheaval in stride: thrumming under all the orderly chaos was the pulse of a vibrant city at peace with its age.

Cairo had weathered thousands of years of worse. Evie was going to investigate and illuminate them all.

She was supposed to go directly to the museum and introduce herself, and then to the guest house where she would be lodging. But Cairo sang to her—and there was a bank of porters-for-hire conveniently lounging alongside the dock. Surely a wander and a spot of tea before she presented herself at the museum couldn’t do any harm. Her valise and pocket book could stay with her, as they contained her money, papers, and the introductory letter. The other boxes could surely go directly to the guesthouse.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t mindful of tales of travellers being cheated and stolen from because of trusting the wrong so-called ‘porter’, but it was all such an adventure that she didn’t the least bit care. What was the worst that could happen? Besides: they were all dressed in such smart blue uniforms, and they looked trustworthy enough.

Throwing caution to the wind, she flagged down the nearest and motioned to her bags. A dark young man with a neatly trimmed moustache nipped to his feet as soon as he saw her wave and came smartly over.

Evie made sure to give him the address of the guest house on a slip of paper, and show him where the river boat’s captain had told her to find it on a pocket map.

Bobbing his head, the young man sang a rapid reply.

“I… oh dear.” She was disappointed to find that her Egyptian Arabic was rather rustier than she recalled. The years away had not been kind. But there was plenty of time to fix that now!

She did her best, then smiled politely, paid him half of what she would owe to ensure prompt service, and wished him a good day.

With a smart little bob of his head, he dashed off with her boxes in a handcart.

Evie watching him weave artfully through the foot traffic and then re-settled her pocketbook under her arm. On to the adventure! She was more than ready to branch out and embrace her country as it was embracing her.

Striding out purposefully, she joined the afternoon walkers. Yes, a spot of tea and a wander and then she would make her way to the Museum.


End file.
